Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson

Tennyson's belief in "the reality of the unseen world" does not necessarily
entail, as Culler thinks it does, the poet's belief in "the unreality of the
material universe."1 The continuing importance of sense-imagery in In
Memoriam, 95, for example, assures that an empirical as well as evangelical,
a hardly partial because not exclusively mystic, experientialism makes for
the climactic quality of this important section.

"This lyric," according to Kincaid, "climaxes the comic movement" of In Memoriam with "a vision of absolute assurance, a full realization of a
new self, and a concurrent realization of the unity of all creation in love."
Here, at last, "irony's tenuous mixture becomes comedy's pure and triumphant assertion of continuity."2 Peltason, calling the section the poet's
"fullest vision of the sum of things and the most celebrated account of the
experience of transcendence in all of Tennyson's poetry," argues that "the
mystical experiences of Tennyson's youth were its model."3

"A kind of waking trance I have frequently had quite up from boyhood,"
declares Tennyson, "when I have been all alone"; here is Hallam Tennyson's
further account of his father's testimony to such mystical experience:

This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two
or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of
the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this
not a confused state; but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of
the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where
death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality
(if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.4

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